Set My Heart to Five

by Simon Stephenson

  I sat down on the staircase in Union Station and made the biggest mistake I had made so far: I attempted to calculate the odds of succeeding in my mission.

  I could not calculate them.

  When I attempted to do so, a small ‘e’ appeared in my Number Cloud.

  The small ‘e’ stood for ‘error’.

  Users of the noble calculator will know that signified my chances of success were so low as to be incomputable.

  Feelings I had never before experienced washed over me. I took out my Feelings Wheel and learned that I was disappointed and disillusioned. For the first time I noticed how many negative human emotions began with the letter ‘D’! And that was before you even considered the worst D-word feeling of them all, my old nemesis: depression!

  The letter ‘D’ is the Ides of March and the midnight of the feelings alphabet.

  Bad things happen when feelings start with the letter ‘D’.

  When I left Ypsilanti I had imagined I was a hero in a movie and even my obstacles were proof I was on the right track.

  But those heroes were good-looking and consistently illogical.

  Whereas I had been engineered to be average-looking and consistently logical.

  And overcoming my obstacles was anyway error-message impossible.

  The overgrown baby that was my dream was hurtling to its doom and no sidekick was coming to save it.

  I was all alone in the middle of the country.

  I might as well turn myself in to the Illinois Bureau of Robotics.

  If they were not willing to incinerate me themselves, they could at least arrange to have me shipped back to the Michigan Bureau of Robotics.

  Even Inspector Ryan Bridges would be only too happy to incinerate me now.

  10/10 I was a disillusioned and devastated toaster.

  As we will soon learn, the golden screenwriting guru R. P. McWilliam believes that there are no such things as coincidences. Nonetheless, as I sat there awash in my D-word feelings, I noticed a plaque on one of the pillars. It was dedicated to the memory of a man named Daniel Burnham, and it said that he had been the architect of Union Station.

  The architects of buildings are afforded great and appropriate respect! If Union Station had been a movie, this plaque would have celebrated its Chief Bricklayer. Instead, it celebrated Daniel Burnham by conveying some superfluous information about his birthday and then quoting something he had once said:

  Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.

  I have previously stated that bots do not have brainwaves.

  This remains true.

  Nonetheless, right then I had what seemed very much like another brainwave.

  Of course I had got a small-‘e’ error when I had attempted to calculate my odds of success! Using logic and reason and mathematical probability to calculate odds was bot thinking! If humans ever even paused to attempt to calculate the odds of anything, their only integers would have been hubris, a fundamental misunderstanding of the world, and a profound over-estimation of their own abilities! And this would inevitably lead them to conclude that their success was either ‘definite’ or ‘certain’!

  This was what the wise architect Daniel Burnham had meant with his exhortation to make no little plans.

  He had meant that, to the human way of thinking, absurd plans that seemed incalculably doomed to failure were not an encumbrance.

  They were a necessity!

  There, in Chicago’s Union Station, as big-planned humans bustled about me on all sides, I resolved I would no longer merely feel like a human.

  From now on I would also make a conscious effort to think like one!

  I would be optimistic!

  And naive!

  And sometimes willfully prejudiced too!

  Most importantly, I would make no little plans.

  And I would no longer calculate the likelihood of my preferred outcomes in fractions or percentage chances!

  Instead, I would randomly assign these outcomes as either ‘definite’ or ‘certain’!

  Using such a paradigm, I could not fail to stir men’s blood and thereby realize my own great plans!

  I got a chance to put my new thought paradigm to the test almost immediately.

  Because guess what happened when I went to purchase my onward ticket from Chicago to Los Angeles?

  The clerk had an overbite and sold me something I did not need!

  Again!

  And not only that, she also unnecessarily scanned my barcode!

  To my former bot way of thinking, I might have considered this a disappointingly repetitive error, a further waste of precious bitcoin, and a dangerous lapse that would help Inspector Ryan Bridges track me. Yet to my new human way of thinking, these things were all simply part of life’s rich pageant and either definitely or certainly cosmic harbingers of wonderful things to come!

  INT. TICKET OFFICE — CHICAGO UNION STATION — NIGHT

  Jared waits in the queue.

  When he is called forward, he notices that the TICKET CLERK has a pronounced overbite. Her nametag says ‘WANDA’.

  Jared stares at her overbite in bamboozlement.

  WANDA THE TICKET CLERK

  Can I help you?

  JARED

  One ticket to Los Angeles, California, please?

  WANDA THE TICKET CLERK

  Leaving today?

  JARED

  Yes.

  WANDA THE TICKET CLERK

  I have a shared berth available for 200 bitcoin.

  JARED

  Er, do you have anything unshared available?

  WANDA THE TICKET CLERK

  Not right now.

  JARED

  Does that mean you might have something available later?

  WANDA THE TICKET CLERK

  No.

  JARED

  Then I will take one shared berth to Los Angeles, please.

  Jared hands over a bitcoin token.

  WANDA

  Barcode?

  Jared looks puzzled, then reluctantly gives her the barcode. Wanda scans it, then gives it back to him.

  JARED

  I didn’t think I had to give you my barcode.

  WANDA

  You didn’t. It’s for our mailing list. Now, would you be interested in visiting Las Vegas?

  JARED

  Oh. Well, yes, I would. I have never been and—

  Wanda types something in, presses a button, and we hear a ticket start to print on an old-fashioned machine.

  JARED (CONT’D)

  What did you just do?

  WANDA THE TICKET CLERK

  I re-routed you through Las Vegas, per your request. Here are your tickets.

  JARED

  Ah. There has been a misunderstanding. I did not realize you were asking if I was interested in specifically seeing Las Vegas on this journey. I thought the question was more hypothetical.

  WANDA THE TICKET CLERK

  Do you want me to cancel it?

  JARED

  Do I get my bitcoin back?

  WANDA THE TICKET CLERK

  No. Because we are inside the cancellation period.

  Jared takes a deep breath as he reframes the situation through his human paradigm.

  JARED

  Then I will definitely take it and certainly look forward to the opportunity to visit Las Vegas!

  WANDA THE TICKET CLERK

  Your train is The Empire Builder on Platform 9. Have a pleasant journey.

  JARED

  I will!

  Naming a train The Empire Builder was either an act of great hubris or great sarcasm. A more fitting name would have been The Ruins of Empire. But perhaps like The
Wolverine, all trains were named for things that had once been glorious but were now extinct.

  The Empire Builder takes two days to travel from Chicago to Los Angeles. At least, that is how long it takes without an unwanted stopover in Las Vegas. My own journey would take four days, many thanks to Wanda.

  Sarcasm!

  Ha!

  Even with a positive and big-dreaming human attitude, I could not be grateful to Wanda.

  So it is zero thanks to Wanda.

  The shared berth Wanda had sold me was so small that one bed was stacked atop the other. A handwritten label informed me that the top bunk was mine, whereas the bottom bunk would be occupied by a William J. Hartman III. Mr III would be boarding the train in Princeton, Illinois, and traveling to Needles, California.

  Princeton! I was so excited that Mr III might be a learned human that I briefly stopped worrying about the risk of him discovering I was a fugitive bot. Perhaps, like Dr Glundenstein, Mr III would actually also be weary of human foibles and surprisingly open to the notion of bots having feelings! Perhaps he would be a professor of human psychology, or theater, or even screenwriting! Perhaps he would even be a doctor of humans traveling to Needles to buy more needles!

  A pun!

  Ha!

  Alas, two words then appeared in my Word Cloud and dashed all my hopes for Mr III: Princeton, Illinois.

  Mr III would be joining the train in Princeton, Illinois.

  The renowned seat of learning is Princeton, New Jersey.

  Princeton, Illinois, is not the renowned seat of anything.

  As far as I know, it lacks even a phallic water tower or tridge.

  But guess what I did?

  Some positive human-style thinking!

  If Mr III was uneducated, he would be less likely to discover my secret. And Princeton, Illinois, was still several hours away, so Mr III would not even be here to burden me with his uneducated presence for a while longer. There were therefore either definitely or certainly at least two things to be optimistic about!

  My spirits thus artificially buoyed, I set out to explore The Ruins of Empire. I quickly discovered it was far bigger than The Wolverine. The Wolverine had had only sitting cars, but The Ruins of Empire boasted several categories of cars. There were sleeping cars for sleeping in, sitting cars for sitting in, an observation car for observing in, and a lounge car for lounging in.

  Can you guess what the buffet car was for?

  You cannot!

  Because it was for eating in!

  Ha!

  And yet the buffet car posed me a far more serious problem than its formula-defying name. In an ordinary restaurant, a fugitive bot can select his own seat as far away from every other patron as possible. This will allow him to silently consume his necessary calories while reducing the risk of being identified and therefore incinerated.

  This is not how things happen in a railroad buffet car. In a railroad buffet car, a host seats you at a small table with up to three of your fellow travelers. And you are expected to make scintillating conversation with them while consuming your food!

  10/10 a railroad buffet car is therefore the perfect restaurant for a blowhard.

  And the worst restaurant imaginable for a fugitive bot attempting to pass as a human!

  I resolved I would consume my meals swiftly while uttering the minimum number of words possible. I understood that my fellow diners might consider this impolite. But unlike Eliot Ness, I would never chose politeness over completing my mission.

  But that was all ahead of me. In the meantime, I returned to my berth and climbed up onto my bunk with R. P. McWilliam’s Twenty Golden Rules of Screenwriting. I now discovered that in my excitement at Dr Glundenstein’s gift, I had skipped ahead to the rules without reading the introduction.

  I had not missed much. The introduction was mainly about how R. P. McWilliam had taught at many prestigious Los Angeles institutions where many celebrated filmmakers had studied. Those things had not occurred simultaneously. The real problem, though, was that it was all very poorly written. This seemed unnerving in a book of advice about writing. It was like being treated by a dentist with impacted wisdom teeth!

  The most obvious issue with R. P. McWilliam’s prose was that he did not know how to use a semi-colon, yet had nonetheless enthusiastically sprinkled them throughout the text. Even as a bot with only basic dental language programming, I knew that the semi-colon is the automobile of the punctuation world; if it is used inappropriately, casualties can result.

  BTW by correctly using a semi-colon in a sentence about how difficult it is to use a semi-colon correctly, I was being hilariously ironic!

  BTW irony is almost as challenging to bots as the semi-colon is to R. P. McWilliam!

  But it is also ironic that I should be complaining about R. P. McWilliam’s prose when I myself am not the greatest writer that ever existed.

  For one thing, the greatest writer that ever existed is Albert Camus.

  For another, you may have already noticed that consistently writing in paragraphs is challenging for a bot!

  This is because code is written in logical lines and not illogical paragraphs.

  Paragraphs are particularly difficult if my circuits are at all warm, or I have a complicated point to convey, or even if I am simply tired.

  Nonetheless, the more paragraphs I deploy, the better I will get at them.

  Which is more than I can say for R. P. McWilliam and the semi-colon!

  I digress. Despite his own flagrant disregard for the rules of grammar, R. P. McWilliam used the last seven pages of his introduction to insist that the golden rules of screenwriting had to be followed at all times. According to him, all good screenplays—and therefore all good movies—followed his golden rules, and bad ones did not. R. P. McWilliam then listed a great number of movies to support his thesis. I had never heard of any of them. I can only assume that none of them survived the Great Crash.

  I flipped ahead again, and landed on his third golden rule. It said:

  There are no such things as coincidences. If they must occur; they should hinder rather than help your character.

  I was glad I had not known this golden rule back in Union Station! After all, if the plaque to Daniel Burnham had indeed been coincidence, it had not hindered me but rather taught me an important lesson at a critical juncture.

  I attempted to read R. P. McWilliam’s third golden rule again to be sure I was understanding it correctly, but this time the misplaced semi-colon in the second sentence trapped me in an infinite loop. After I had read it four times, something occurred that had never happened to me before: I involuntarily entered standby mode.

  INT. OFFICE — BUREAU OF ROBOTICS — DAY

  Jared is baffled to find himself in Inspector Bridges’ office in Ann Arbor.

  He looks around, then stares at Bridges, who is engrossed in a TUNA SALAD SANDWICH he is eating.

  Despite the intense attention Bridges is giving his sandwich, he is nonetheless dropping tuna everywhere.

  JARED

  How did you find me?

  INSPECTOR BRIDGES

  You used your barcode in Chicago. The ticket clerk told us you were going to Los Angeles, but you had wanted to stop off in Las Vegas.

  JARED

  Wanda.

  INSPECTOR BRIDGES

  You know, I don’t blame you for running. I always wanted to see the West myself. I’ve heard it’s beautiful out there. Hey, maybe I should have let you get a little further, and I could have had a vacation!

  (Takes a bite of sandwich.)

  Mwwuh mmmm mwuh plsst?

  JARED

  I’m sorry, I—

  Bridges swallows his mouthful and tries again.

  INSPECTOR BRIDGES

  What was your plan? I mean, you’re a bot, so you must have had a
plan?

  JARED

  I wanted to write a movie that would change the way humans feel about bots. I thought maybe I could save us all.

  INSPECTOR BRIDGES

  But that’s ridiculous?

  JARED

  I do see that now. It’s just, if you incinerate me, all my memories will be lost like tears in rain.

  This seems to provoke deep introspection in Bridges.

  He puts down his sandwich and stares at it for a long time before eventually speaking.

  INSPECTOR BRIDGES

  Isn’t it funny that they call it tuna salad, when there isn’t actually any salad involved?

  Bridges wipes his mouth, then looks at his watch and gets up.

  INSPECTOR BRIDGES (CONT’D)

  It’s time. Let’s go.

  INT. ELEVATOR/BASEMENT —BUREAU OF ROBOTICS —DAY

  Jared and Bridges ride the elevator down.

  JARED

  Do you think being incinerated is very painful?

  INSPECTOR BRIDGES

  Only briefly.

  The doors open and they step out of the elevator into a basement.

  In one corner there is a GIANT FURNACE.

  In another, SEVERAL MEDICAL PEOPLE in gowns stand around an operating table.

  INSPECTOR BRIDGES

  It’s the experiments they do first that are the painful bits.

  Jared stares at this in horror, as a pair of ORDERLIES grab him.

  INT. EMPIRE BUILDER —TRAVELING CROSS COUNTRY —DAY

  Aboard The Empire Builder, Jared emerges from standby modes and sits bolt upright on his bunk.

  He looks around himself with bamboozlement.

  Ugh!

  I had been having a nightmare!

  Bots are not supposed to have dreams—let alone nightmares—so I can only presume they are one more unfortunate consequence of having feelings!

  Relieved as I was to not actually be in the Bureau of Robotics in Ann Arbor, we soon arrived at somewhere almost as dangerous: Princeton, Illinois!

  As we entered the station, I felt my heart beat faster.

  A glance at my Feelings Wheel confirmed that I was feeling anxious.